Researchers in the United Kingdom have reported that three out of five individuals of South Asian ancestry carry a gene that doubles the risk of severe to severe respiratory failure. COVID-19.
The study by researchers at the University of Oxford says that the high-risk version of the gene, ‘leucine zipper transcription factor-like 1’, or LZTFL1, “probably makes the cells lining the airways and lungs” respond properly to the virus. The researchers also said that the genetic signal doubled the risk of dying from COVID-19 in adults under the age of 65.
“But importantly, it does not appear to affect the immune system, so researchers are hopeful that this version of the gene may be altered in response to vaccines,” Oxford said in a release on the study’s findings, published on Thursday. There will be people.”
“While we cannot change our genetics, our results suggest that people with high-risk genes are particularly likely to benefit from vaccination. Since the genetic signal affects the lungs rather than the immune system, this means That increased risk should be canceled out by the vaccine,” the release quoted study co-lead James Davis, associate professor of genomics at Oxford’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine.
The study published in Nature Genetics (‘Identification of LZTFL1 as a candidate effector gene at a COVID-19 risk locus’: Hughes et al) is a genome-wide association study (GWAS) aimed at identifying such candidate genes. Which can cause severe covid- 19 which can cause multiple organ failure through cytokine release etc.
The major finding of the GWAS was that 60 percent of those with South Asian ancestry carry a high-risk genetic signal, compared with 15 percent of people of European ancestry. This, the release said, “partly explains the additional deaths observed in some communities in the UK and the impact of COVID-19 in the Indian subcontinent”.
The study also found that only 2 percent of people of Afro-Caribbean ancestry carried a high-risk genetic indication, “meaning that this genetic factor does not fully explain the higher mortality rates reported for black and minority ethnic communities.” does”.
Davis underlined that “socioeconomic factors are also important in explaining why some communities have been particularly badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic”.
“We found that a genetic factor explains why some people become very seriously ill.” coronavirus Infection. This suggests that the way the lung responds to infection is important. This is important because most treatments have focused on changing the way in which the immune system responds to the virus,” he said.
Study co-lead Jim Hughes, a professor of gene regulation, was quoted as saying: “The reason this has proved so difficult to work with is that previously unrecognized genetic signals affect the “dark matter” of the genome. We found that the increased risk is not due to differences in genes coding for proteins, but due to differences in DNA that switch genes to turn on. The number of genes affected by such an indirect switch effect It’s very hard to find out.”
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